For Brooklyn-based Alberta Cross, keeping it in the band has been key. While they’ve added and dropped members, guitarist/vocalist Petter Ericson Stakee and bassist Terry Wolfers make up the band’s core duo. The two have been together since meeting in London in 2005. They blend a wide variety of styles, Stakee said, but critics often pigeonhole the band as a Neil Young sound-alike.
“It’s a common thing. [The comparisons] don’t bother me too much,” he said, adding that he finds these labels lazy. He takes more direction from soul music and David Bowie than Young, he said.
Alberta Cross formed after Stakee met Wolfers in a bar. Stakee’s band needed a bass player, he said, and Wolfers fit the bill. After that band broke up, the two stayed together. They released an EP, The Thief & the Heartbreaker, in 2007. Stakee remembers that record as being a very free experience, he said.
“We were in London, we were sort of dreaming about being somewhere else,” he said. “We wrote all the songs because of that.”
The band followed up the EP with their full-length debut, Broken Side of Time. Recorded in Austin, TX, Stakee said that it was a completely different process than recording the EP. The duo wanted to work with outside producers, Stakee said, but still had a clear vision of how they the music should sound.
“We’re very hands-on with production on all our stuff,” he said. “We know exactly how we want it, pretty much. Then, sometimes it can be frustrating when you hire someone else to do that. But we did it, we were the ones to pay for someone to come in and produce and co-produce things with us.”
It took the band three years to follow up Broken Side of Time. With Songs of Patience, released this July, the band wanted to get back to the more “organic” sound heard on Heartbreaker, Stakee said.
They had a hard time getting there, though. The duo had to fire five producers and three band members, according to the Alberta Cross website. It was a need for Stakee and Wolfers to keep control over the project that led to the high turnover, Stakee said.
“One of the points when we started this band is we’d been playing in other bands with a lot of different members, and we’d kind of gone through the struggle of having a lot of people with opinions,” he said. “I feel like with us, why should we have other people’s opinions? I write pretty much every song and Terry has good ideas, and we sort of bounce ideas between us.”
In the end, Stakee and Wolfers finished the album with producer Claudius Mittendorfer (Franz Ferdinand, Interpol). Mittendorfer understood the band, Stakee said, describing the producer as “brilliant” and calling him family. Working with Mittendorfer also gave the duo the power over their music they had been looking for, Stakee added.
“When we worked with someone like him, a younger, very hungry sort of producer/engineer, we could kind of produce it, and then have him co-produce it a little bit with us, and come in with his ideas,” Stakee said. “But we could have it under control.”
